The perennial performer

Downing his gardening tools, pensioner Martin Harvey got on his bike and set about writing his name into the long-distance record books

- Martin Harvey and David Bradford

“We married in ‘62, but I’d taken a break from riding – my wife didn’t know me as a cyclist.” Martin Harvey is telling me about his late wife Jackie, who died in 2010, two years short of their golden wedding anniversary. It was a good job he had stopped riding, I joke, else it might have put her off. Harvey lets out a big laugh. “You’re right, it doesn’t mix with family life. I was busy with other things, keeping fit by digging the garden.”

Harvey is speaking to me by video call from his home in the West Midlands, and I’ve asked him to start at the beginning. He explains how his interest in cycling dates back to starting work as a 16-year-old in 1952. “It was 10 miles there and 10 miles back,” he remembers, “and the bus fare was going to add up to as much as a bike, so I bought a Claude Butler.” Twenty miles a day soon got him fit enough to compete, and so he did just that, joining his local club Walsall Roads. “I did a couple of 25-mile time trials just on commuting fitness, a 1.05 and then a 1.04,” he leafs through the mental results sheets.

Next came his first extended break from cycling: in early 1954 he was called up for National Service and posted to the Far East for two years. When he got back, although he’d lost some cycling fitness, he dusted off the Claude Butler and slotted straight back into the local racing scene. “We didn’t know how to train in those days,” he reflects. “We just did long miles, 100 on a Sunday, and sprinted for every town sign or lamppost.” Despite the unscientific methods, Harvey tore through the ranks from fourth-cat to first-cat in just two and a half years.